This volume investigates emblematic and art-historical issues in Lavinia Fontana’s mythological paintings. Fontana is the first female painter of the sixteenth century in Italy to depict female nudes, as well as mythological and emblematic paintings associated with concepts of beauty and wisdom. Her paintings reveal an appropriation of the antique, a fusion between patronage and culture, and a humanistic pursuit of Mannerist conceits. Fontana’s secular imagery provides a challenging paragone with the male tradition of history painting during the sixteenth century and paves the way for new subjects to be depicted and interpreted by female painters of the seventeenth century.

Drawing on some sixty works and for the first time, the Museo del Prado will jointly present the most important paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1535-1625) and Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). The two artists achieved recognition and fame among their contemporaries for and despite their status as female painters. Both were able to break away from the prevailing stereotypes assigned to women in relation to artistic practice and the deep-rooted scepticism regarding women's creative and artistic abilities.The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will present the work of these two women, whose artistic personalities were to some extent obscured over the course of time but who in the last thirty years have once again aroused the interest of specialists and the general public.

"Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana was the most significant and prolific woman artist of Renaissance Europe. Her large and renowned body of work encompasses several genres, including altarpieces, history paintings, and portraits. This extensively illustrated book is the first comprehensive study of Fontana in the English language. Art historian Caroline P. Murphy assesses the relation of Fontana's native city of Bologna to the artist's work and career, proposing that the unique attributes of the city, its religious and social climate and the citizens who became Fontana's patrons contributed importantly to her success as an artist." "Employing an especially varied set of source materials, from personal letters, baptismal records, property inventories, and wills to such contemporary printed sources as sermons, poems, and scientific treatises, the book opens a window on the little-known world of a professional woman of Renaissance Italy."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The works of Bolognese Mannerist portraiture painter Lavinia Fontana (1552 - 1614).

Surveying the women painters, engravers and sculptors working in 16th and 17th century Italy, this text examines their artistic practices and achievements.

Love, desire, and beauty are intimately connected in Greek and Roman mythology, dominating the lives of gods and mortals. The texts that focus on these themes ? Homer?s Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid?s Metamorphoses, and Virgil?s Aeneid, among many others ? were revered by Renaissance and Baroque artists, who aimed to represent them in a powerfully expressive manner.00This fully illustrated catalogue offers a detailed study of mythological paintings by Titian, Veronese, Allori, Rubens, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck, and Velázquez. Inspired in some cases by a desire to emulate and in others by a sense of rivalry, these artists were responsible for the creation of a fascinating interpretative sequence that reflects the adaptability of the mythological tradition and its potential for constant renewal.00Exhibition: Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain (02.03.-04.07.2021).

This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.